On Friday, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Railways, and Electronics and Information Technology, in a written response informed the Rajya Sabha that neither WhatsApp nor its parent company Meta has communicated any plans to exit India.
This statement was in response to an unstarred question from MP Vivek K. Tankha, who inquired whether WhatsApp intends to shut down its services in the country due to government directives to share user details.
Earlier this year, WhatsApp and Meta had expressed concerns about India's 2021 IT rules for social media intermediaries, particularly the requirement to identify the initial source of information. In April, WhatsApp and Meta challenged these rules in the Delhi High Court, arguing that complying would compromise their end-to-end encryption, which ensures that messages can only be read by the sender and the receiver.
Vaishnaw clarified that, despite the ongoing legal proceedings, WhatsApp or Meta have not notified the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) about any plans to cease their services in India.
For nearly a decade, WhatsApp's messages have been protected by end-to-end encryption, based on an open-source system developed by Signal. However, the 2021 IT rules require platforms like WhatsApp to implement "traceability," enabling authorities to trace forwarded messages back to their origin. WhatsApp has argued that such traceability would undermine the encryption that is fundamental to its service.
The legal challenge in India represents one of WhatsApp's most significant battles over encryption. Similar issues have arisen in other countries, such as Brazil, where WhatsApp faced intermittent bans due to legal disputes over user data access. As India strengthens its regulations over digital communication, the potential for a ban on WhatsApp looms, but for now, the messaging service remains operational.